As revelations and accusations at the Charbonneau Commission into corruption in the construction industry inch higher up the political ladder — implicating everyone from city engineers to political bagmen — let’s take a trip back on the Quebec corruption time machine.

It was the first day of spring, 1974, and a great madness erupted at the LG-2 hydroelectric development at James Bay. Rioting workers burned buildings and rammed bulldozers into the mammoth construction project, causing $35 million in damage. More than 900 workers had to be flown out of the remote northern community. Robert Bourassa knew he could no longer ignore a deep-rooted culture of violence and intimidation in Quebec’s construction industry.

The Liberal premier summoned Robert Cliche, a judge with strong New Democrat Party lineage, to head up a public inquiry into violence and union freedom. Cliche was joined on the panel by a 36-year-old lawyer and Progressive Conservative organizer named Brian Mulroney, and by a vice-president of the Centrale de l’enseignement du Québec named Guy Chevrette. The commission’s lawyer was Lucien Bouchard.

But public hearings have a way of taking on a life of their own, meandering into dangerous, unpredictable, career-wrecking territory.

“In the Beauce, it is called ‘la politique de trappeur,’ ” Cliche later told columnist L. Ian MacDonald. “You go into the woods and you set a trap and you leave it. Leave it and go back in seven days. Something will be in the trap.”

Over the next year, the commission would hold 68 days of hearings and focus on 279 characters in the union and construction world. By the time Cliche and company filed their 602-page report in May 1975, the inquiry had morphed from a probe into the exercise of union freedoms into an exposé of what was then described as “an organized system of corruption without parallel in North America.”

Union leaders were discredited and cabinet ministers implicated. The trail of misconduct led to Bourassa’s office, where the premier’s special adviser had reportedly asked a union boss to help with a byelection on the same day he offered a monopoly over work at James Bay. The inquiry concluded that union corruption could not have been so deeply entrenched unless it had been actively supported by the government.

“A devastating document,” proclaimed a Gazette editorial. “For some four years, the Bourassa government worked hand in glove with gangster union leadership in the province’s construction industry.”

There were tales of nepotism, bribery, sabotage, blackmail and intimidation; charges of union organizers with criminal records who gave lessons in how to break legs; thugs-for-hire who would happily beat up a rival union organizer’s teenager or strangle their dog.

Almost as frightening was an aura of complacency, a ‘So what?’ and ‘What you gonna do about it?’ reaction from key witnesses and from union rank-and file. As one union delegate put it, “How do you think a government commission is going to settle problems if the workers themselves are not willing to respect the law? By increasing the number of baseball bats in circulation?”

And then what happened?

“Our involvement ended the day we submitted the report,” Mulroney would tell L. Ian MacDonald in August 1975. “Whatever happened after that, well, that’s politics.” There were consequences. Some of the report’s 134 recommendations were enacted, particularly related to stricter control over Quebec unions, their representatives and membership. In November 1976, Bourassa’s Liberal government fell to the Parti Québécois.

Yet Cliche, who was just 58 when he died of a heart attack in 1978, seemed to foresee obstacles to a genuine permanent overhaul in the construction industry, even as he wished for a “crise de conscience” by the Quebec government.

“The work that this commission has done will matter little, even if the undesirables are purged from the positions they hold, even if the laws governing the construction sector are improved, if those who make the laws do not have the will to apply them and see that they are respected,” he cautioned in that prophetic report 37 years ago.

“When a big housecleaning is required, strong people must wield the broom.”

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